Search the Community

I'm new to managing macOS, and I find that (for some reason) macOS screen share has the tendency to hang after a while. When I type `w`, I see the same person's session showing up multiple times. It's like they're not logging out, but every time they connect, it creates a whole new session. Even if they're having trouble connecting, I see them as someone who's logged in, based on the time they logged in. Is there a limit to number of people that can connect to a Mac Pro at the same time? How can I kill a person's session completely without killing other's sessions?

Hi there So, during the pandemic lockdown, I started living with my girlfriend (now wife) and her nephew. And we had one computer that was the best one and I had to find a way to share it with the two of them... It was a 4th gen i5 notebook, but my wife had a much older centrino notebook and our nephew had nothing (I got a Raspberry Pi for him). And I did a research about how I could share my computer in a way that they could have a minimum quality on their machines and stopped on ThinLinc as my solution for remote desktop access. So, we got married, moved to an apartment and bring my old gaming PC from my parent's house. I was always thinking about how I could use ThinLinc to play games remotely... and recently I've found about VirtualGL, which could be used combined with ThinLinc to provide hardware accelerated graphics. Today I've written a tutorial and published a video about how you could use ThinLinc, VirtualGL and SteamLink to play games on a remote machine... The "remote machine" can be your gaming machine on your room that you want to access from your couch, for just simple tasks up to some games. Not every game will work on this setup because VirtualGL only works with OpenGL applications. But at least your machine can be used by more than one user at same time, leaving it as a good performance thin client that you can share with lower performance machines to "improve" their performance So, I'm pasting my tutorial here if you're interested Headless Remote Gaming Machine tutorial - ThinLinc+VirtualGL+Steam Link ThinLinc + VirtualGL + Steam Link: A Headless remote gaming computer accessible from Raspberry Pi and weak machines. TL;DR: Tutorial for installing a remote machine that can play games using the remote GPU power and can be used by other users with some privacy (i.e.: your game is not going to be shown on a remote physical monitor). Reference Video - https://youtu.be/aiLB0-Jbwlw Hi there! I've written the following tutorial because I've seen a lot of people that could benefit from it recently. Also, I'm interested on alternatives for remote gaming on a machine that you have to share with other users and access remotely. During the pandemic isolation, a lot of people started home-office and not everyone was ready to suddenly have the whole family working from home: people didn't have enough computers to share with family, or the computers were slow, or they had to access their office computers from home… So, search for the subject "Remote Access" grew a lot because it was a way to mitigate the need for a more powerful machine at home. By using a remote access application, people could use their computer from home, they could share a single machine with others… But how about gaming? There are some applications that let you run a game on your remote computer, but without some workarounds, the local machine is going to be busy showing the game running on the local monitor and being transmitted to the remote client. Some people create scripts for headless gaming, use dummy plugs, etcetera, but it's not that easy for everyone to accomplish this. In this tutorial, I'm going to present an easy way to headless remote access a Linux machine (that means that your session is not being shown anywhere else), you can share the machine simultaneously with other users (locally or remotely) and, most important, you have GPU acceleration for some applications* (*OpenGL applications). DISCLAIMER: I'm not responsible if you cause any damage to your computer by following this tutorial, neither are the companies behind the software used on it. All the following procedures should be safe to run, but may differ between the distros. If you have a specific question regarding the tools' installation procedures on your distro, maybe their forums will provide you better support. Feel free to ask any question if you have one. So, what do you need? Linux operating system - ThinLinc - https://www.cendio.com - VirtualGL - https://www.virtualgl.org or maybe already on your distro's repository - Steam and Steam Link - https://store.steampowered.com/remoteplay - for android, ios, windows, linux… - A computer to access the ThinLinc server - I'm using a Raspberry Pi 2, but it could be almost anything that can run a ThinLinc client. Why do I need it? ThinLinc is a remote desktop application that provides you a full virtual remote session. Some remote desktop applications will just show you the local monitor and interact with a local user. ThinLinc will let you use your remote desktop using a virtual desktop session, I mean, only you are going to see that screen and other users are free to login to the same machine and have their own virtual remote desktop sessions or even a local desktop session if they are physically at the computer. ThinLinc is free for up to 5 simultaneously connected users per domain, so it is enough for me, my family and still have room for more people if I want. I won't get past the free tier. If you need more than 5 concurrent users or would like to use it in large scale, check their website. There are other solutions that work more or less the same way as ThinLinc, but it has been my choice because ThinLinc supports VirtualGL. VirtualGL provides a way to render graphics on the local GPU and send it somewhere else. Most remote desktop applications don't have a way to render 3D graphics on hardware, that's why you can't play on them. ThinLinc is one that can be combined with VirtualGL and provide hardware accelerated graphics. Steam Link is not really necessary, but it's made for remote gaming and will add some features to enhance this remote gaming experience. By combining it to the ThinLinc+VirtualGL, you will be able to get a smoother framerate and also will be able to use controllers. How to get it working? On the remote machine (the one running the games) Install ThinLinc Server and configure it - https://www.cendio.com/thinlinc/download Install VirtualGL and configure it - through your distro repository or https://virtualgl.org Install Steam (recommended) - https://store.steampowered.com On the client machine (the one you are going to use to play the games) Install ThinLinc Client - https://www.cendio.com/thinlinc/download Install Steam Link (optional) - https://store.steampowered.com/remoteplay For the remote machine: ThinLinc Server is easy to install: Reference Video 3:29 - Unzip the contents and run the "install-server" and follow instructions. Also refer to their official install guide: https://www.cendio.com/thinlinc/docs/install https://www.cendio.com/resources/docs/tag/ PS: When installing ThinLinc to openSUSE Tumbleweed, I had to do some workarounds because Tumbleweed changed some file locations. Also, my machine was behind NAT and I had to configure the HOST_ALIASES parameter and run a SSH tunnel. The tumbleweed workarounds were mostly symlinks pointing to the correct file locations. Details about how to use HOST_ALIASES and SSH Tunnel here: https://community.thinlinc.com/t/my-personal-thinlinc-use-case-and-some-performance-comparison/173 VirtualGL also is easy to install: on most distros you can find it on the distro's repository. To configure it, run vglserver_config (reference video 10:05).The recommendation is to restrict it only to vglusers group for security reasons, but most of you won't need to restrict it on your personal computers. Refer to the documentation - https://virtualgl.org/vgldoc/2_2_1/ Steam also is pretty simple to install. There's an oficial .deb package at their home page, but most distros have it on their repositories. Also there's a flatpak available. Now on the client machine: ThinLinc Client is simple to install (reference video 1:26). Get the corresponding package at their website and install it. If your remote machine is behind a NAT, you may workaround it by using port forwarding, split DNS, VPN or SSH Tunnel and set up the HOST_ALIASES parameter if needed. I think that the easiest way is to use the SSH Tunnel and set HOST_ALIASES (reference video 4:50). Also you may check ThinLinc Community ot this post here: https://community.thinlinc.com/t/my-personal-thinlinc-use-case-and-some-performance-comparison/173 Steam Link is also pretty simple to install - Get it on their webpage: https://store.steampowered.com/remoteplay . In the reference video, the Raspberry Pi 2 is not compatible with Steam Link. So, Steam Link appears at 17:00 when I'm using my smartphone to use both the video streaming and sending controller input, and at 32:02 when I install it to my local computer to be able to play FPS Games using my keyboard/mouse and controller. Now that everything is installed and configured, here's how it works: - You connect to your ThinLinc+VirtualGL server machine and start Steam - You set the "Launch Options" for the OpenGL game that you want to play to: LD_PRELOAD="${LD_PRELOAD#libdlfaker.so:libvglfaker.so:}:libdlfaker.so:libvglfaker.so" %command% (Reference: https://github.com/VirtualGL/virtualgl/issues/25 ) - (Optional) Connect to your remote machine and play using Steam Link; - Run your game and enjoy. And here's a big FAQ: Why don't you just use Steam + Steam Link? Why do I need ThinLinc and VirtualGL? Because by using Steam + Steam Link, the remote machine running Steam is going to display and interact with the Steam Link session… By default, you need that your account is logged on and Steam is running on the remote machine. If you're not logged in your account locally, how could you start steam remotely? How about other local users? Will they be able to use the computer physically while you're using it for Steam gaming? There are some people who worked around it by running a "Headless Steam", but it seemed more difficult to get working. And Headless Steam is going to be a solution to run games, not a complete remote desktop experience. Are there any alternatives? For ThinLinc - yes: an alternative, for example, would be TigerVNC and TurboVNC for example. ThinLinc is based on TigerVNC (they are the maintainers) and TurboVNC has been built with VirtualGL in mind. I think that ThinLinc is a lot easier to set up and will easily work if you can SSH to the remote machine. For VirtualGL - I don't know any other project like it. It would be great if there was a vulkan capable project like it, but I don't know if there is such a project. For Steam Link - I'm not sure how easy it would be to use another solution to cover Steam Link's part in this tutorial. Can I play any Steam games/any hardware accelerated application? No. VirtualGL only works for OpenGL applications Maybe in the future. Can I use a controller? Does this combination work with games that require a mouse? Yes, through Steam Link. ThinLinc can't redirect your controller input to a remote machine (unless you use some local application that translates your controller input to key presses, so I would recommend attaching a controller to Steam Link and use it. For games that need mouse input, especially FPS games, attach keyboard and mouse to the Steam Link. For some reason, FPS games don't get the right mouse input when running remotely, I guess that's because the remote applications don't send the coordinates the way that the game wants… I 've seen a guy using Spice to play remotely and he had the same problem. And it's the same symptoms if you try to use a Wacom as a mouse for FPS games according to a friend. Thanks to: Cendio (for both ThinLinc and TigerVNC) VirtualGL project (for VirtualGL) Valve (for Steam and Steam Link)

So one of the things I have been fighting for a while is being able to remote access my server running Ubuntu w/GUI without display output. I used to have no issues at all and all the sudden one day things changed. At first and still to this day (been working and failing at this for over a year) I thought it was a driver issue, fixed and reinstalled drivers, I went so far as to completely wipe the server and start fresh during Christmas, I have updated the drivers for the crappy GTX 580 (I think is what is in there) and still. I can only access and use my server if there is a display output attached to the server, otherwise I get what you can see in the video. I have asked numerous professors at my college and not a single one has any freaking clue what could cause this. I found out there are some systems that do not allow access to a display output without outputting that display to a monitor, this wouldnt account for the 6 months I had with no issues though. I have tried TeamViewer and VNC Viewer and no luck with either. Would love any ideas or help. IMG_8390.MOV

So, I want to get this working with kali linux. Tried it, I couldn't get the app to connect to the pi. IDK what to do. It worked when I tried with raspbian.

Hello, as the title suggest I am having some issues with getting Tight VNC to work with Linux Mint 19.2 Cinnamon as the server/receiving end. I have a windows laptop that I am trying to remote into an Unraid Linux VM running on a server. I'm having a hard time using the built-in remote tool in Unraid (NoVNC) since I have a touchscreen laptop and there is a bug which prevents the cursor from showing when using NoVNC. As such I am in need of another option and since I am familiar with Tight, wanted to try that. The problem is that when I connect all I get is a blank grey screen with an x icon instead of my cursor. After googling around I can see that others have had this problem and apparently solved it but I am very new to Linux and the posters in these older threads seem to be very comfortable with their Linux skills. I do consider myself fairly adept with problem-solving and tech in general, but as I mentioned, it's more or less my first time ever in Linux. I have gotten nautilus to show up in the VNC window but nothing else beyond that. So if someone knows anything about solving this issue, if you could help me out and be patient if I ask beginner questions it would be greatly appreciated! Thanks for the read (PS Sorry if this is posted in the wrong sub-forum, please tell me and I'll correct it asap)

With the support for some linux apps on chrome os, I am curious if anyone has attempted to install a vnc server such as remmina. My current use case is helping my grandparents with their chromebook, which is the only computer they have ever owned and is thus a challenge for them. The idea was that any member of my immediate family could remote into their chromebook through chrome rdp and assist them with any issues. However, they often mess up something with their chrome window and are unable to get to the shortcut that leads to the chrome rdp site (for those who are unaware, they must relay a code to me over the phone so I can connect). What I would much rather do is install a vnc server so that I can connect under any circumstances, provided their internet hasn't gone down. Would a vnc server installed in the linux container on chrome os allow this, and does such support for vnc servers exist in the first place?

Hi all I'm having trouble connecting to my computer via my mobile (using androidvnc) to my TightVNC server on my home computer, my internal IP (192.xxx..) works to connect just fine, but when I try to connect using my external IP, it just states "VNC connection failed", "Connection refused!". My external IP is linked to DDNS hostname, also doesn't work. Used a port checking tool online and it shows my external IP, and it says its open, but using the FreePortScanner tool it says it's closed, open on my internal IP. I have the port forwarded on the Sagecomm. Any ideas? Thanks!

Is anyone else here using PIA as their VPN? Im just wondering if they are do any of u find your connection slow or have issues staying connected on weekends of bank holidays? France and Germany which i try and use cos they support port forwarding seem to be tedious.

How practical would it be to leave a tower running at home and remote connect to it whenever I need a computer on the go (ideally with an iPad Pro)? This seems like the ideal setup to me for both power and portability, but I have no idea whether it is possible or what tools are available to accommodate such an idea. The other huge benefit is not having to sync files back and forth. All my files would be stored in one central location. Is this possible now? Will it be in five years? Right now, I use a Macbook with Screens 4 VNC client to access my Linux work computer part time, but the experience is not one I would want to rely on all the time. One issue is that the work tower treats its own display as native and then my Macbook scales that image to fit my remote display. In this way it must be rendered and processed twice, causing extra lag and distortion. Are there any methods for the tower graphics card to talk directly to the remote display and treat it as native? The other issues with my current setup are latency and framerate. They are both just slow enough to be annoying. I'd like to see maybe 30ms and 30fps. Is this just an internet connection speed issue or are there other problems with using a tower remotely? Any insight is appreciated.

As the title says, when I remote into my machine through VNC, how do I disable the local screen? I am currently running Ubuntu GNOME 15.04

Hi, I recently ran into a problem while trying to setup a VNC connection to a server I had just rented for personal use. I essentially followed this guide line by line but I end up with a brown screen that I will attach to this at the bottom. http://www.havetheknowhow.com/Configure-the-server/Install-VNC.html thinking that the virtual desktop didn't work I opted to install the real desktop using sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop however that did absolutely nothing and vncserver still shows the same exact thing.